“Grandfather Dragon” (#27: Project 365 Sketches)
Sketch Club app; iPad | Hi-Res image (1536 x 2048).
2013, Sun 27 Jan. This started, earlier in the month, as an accidental doodle and discovering the mirroring feature in the app. The doodle looked like a dragon’s face and I expanded on that. It took me about a week and several tried to compose a satisfactory pose. #365sketches
How it was done
1. This was done with the Sketchy tool, set to mirror. I started with the eyes and worked outwards to make the head.
2. On a separate layer, I did a quick sketch of a pose. Getting a satisfactory pose was the hardest part for me. Various versions as follows.
3. These were too snake-like.
4. This looked more promising and at that point, I thought this would be the final version.
5. I did a quick paint layer, to get a feel of the possible colour scheme to adopt.
6. When I revisited the sketch, I decided the earlier pose wasn’t quite it. I managed to find a reference on Google images and adapted the pose.
7. After painting in the body area, I discovered a happy unintended accident: setting a Fill layer to an Overlay setting created an interesting and somewhat glowing outline effect. I decided that would make a nice deep blue-black dragon. I used an Eraser tool to ‘paint’ the outline. Then utilised a Brush setting and ‘erased’ out the body highlights.
8. I shifted and downsized the head slightly, then brushed in the head colouring.
9. Then it was more detailing, painting in the wispy clouds (Particles setting) etc.
